Alec Baldwin is to pen a memoir, Nevertheless, which will be published in 2016 by Harper.

Announcing the news, publisher Jonathan Burnham described it as “funny, occasionally combative, often moving,” straddling everything from his childhood to his stance on politics and the media. “He writes about his family, lovers, friends and enemies, confronts his former demons, relives the highs and lows of his career, and opens up in an unflinchingly honest way about his life and times.”

As anyone following Baldwin’s career will know, those life and times are richly, sometimes embarrassingly vibrant. His film hits straddle action, drama and comedy, including The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Cooler, which earned him an Oscar nomination. He has latterly been adored for his longstanding role as a coolly abrasive TV executive in Tina Fey’s sitcom 30 Rock.

But it’s his personal life, and outbursts on Twitter and elsewhere, that have earned him notoriety. His relationship with Kim Basinger made the couple the Brangelina of the early 90s, but they separated in 2000, setting off a protracted custody case for their child. Baldwin has already written bitterly about that experience in the memoir A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce, in which he attacks the apparent venality of Basinger’s legal team.

During that period he angrily called his daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig” in a phone conversation published by TMZ – but there was more to come. There was an air rage incident when he was asked to stop playing the Scrabble-like game Words with Friends, and he was escorted off the flight. His show Up Late with Alec Baldwin was cancelled by MSNBC after he called a paparazzo a “cocksucking faggot”, later saying he was a victim of “the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy”.

His Twitter demeanour can be equally fiery, once launching a vitriolic attack on the Daily Mail after the newspaper wrote an article claiming his wife was tweeting during James Gandolfini’s funeral. “I’m gonna find you George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck you up,” he wrote, referring to the Mail reporter. “Someone wrote that my wife was tweeting at a funeral. Hey. That’s not true. But I’m gonna tweet at your funeral.”

He still continues to get eye-catching roles, appearing next in Cameron Crowe’s forthcoming (and as-yet untitled) air force romance starring Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone, as well as Mission: Impossible 5, which is currently filming.